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What G&T is all About ...

Food forms the very essence of life, from the fruit fly to the elephant, with humans in between. So much of what we do revolves around cooking, eating, and the finding of food. Here you'll discover stories, meditations, and photographs celebrating the places that we call home. And, of course, the food that garnishes it all.

"My definition of Man is, a 'Cooking Animal'. The beasts have memory, judgement, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook....Man alone can dress a good dish; and every man whatever is more or less a cook, in seasoning what he himself eats." ~~ James Boswell

Who’s visiting?

As Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and that is never truer when it comes to family reunions.

There’s something rather poignant about pictures of family reunions – they chronicle the passing of time and people. But they don’t reveal the tensions and tight lips and twitchy fists that crop up at these periodic gatherings of dozens of personalities bound by blood and DNA and fumblings under long-gone sheets.

Instead, these graphic portraits usually show something (might it be hope?), suggesting that family reunions give you one more chance to get it right. If you need to, that is. Or want to!

Family reunions, as interpreted by French artist Frédéric Bazille (1841 – 1870)*, appear so peaceful, so proper, and so paradisiacal.

Family Reunion

You want to bound into his Paris studio and ask him, before it’s too late, “Is it real?”

He’d likely answer, “Yes, it’s not always ideal, but it’s real.”

Family Reunion on the Terrace at Meric, 1867

Looking at the faces of Bazille’s people, knowing they woke up every day, ate, talked, laughed, loved, dreamed – you have to wonder about the details behind all that. And in visualizing the menu served on that terrace, you might imagine sparkling glasses of lemonade and buttery pastry filled with red raspberries oozing juice, wasps and bees darting drunkenly from plate to plate.

Food history, in the end, essentially concerns families and their various reunions, doesn’t it?

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.